Obama: 3/5 of a President

While we were all shopping and arguing over whether or not fruitcake is fit for human consumption, Obama decided to go to bat and fight for someone. Who was he fighting for? The torturers of the Bush administration, that’s who. Oh, and anyone else in the United States government who wants to torture and violate the human rights of others.

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here’s how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.” They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

And people wonder what this “hatred” is towards Obama. “I didn’t get my pony?” they ask? Ha. They have no idea. I hate Obama for the same reasons I hate Bush. Why? Because Obama IS Bush. His administration is one and the same as the Bush administration, and I mean that quite literally when it comes to justice, human rights, and the wars. ALL THE SAME PEOPLE are running the show, and we know that Bush’s Justice Department is a bunch of corrupt, human rights-violating flunkies recruited from the ranks of the “religious right”. And they are still in office, fighting for their hatreds

Now Obama is not just passively letting these people continue the Bush/Cheney yearas, he is going out of his way to enable them.

He is putting his name to the most egregious violations of human rights in this nation’s history.

What’s really pathological is that he is shitting on the very system that freed African American people, of which he is a gene-carrying member.

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that “torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use.”

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., had ruled that government officials were immune from suit because at that time it was unclear whether abusing prisoners at Guantanamo was illegal.

Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

Ironically, the first African American president is promoting a policy frighteningly familiar to the Dred Scott decision of yesteryear:

“Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not ‘persons’ within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow,” he added.

The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants – whether or not they were slaves – were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.

Thanks, Obama. Next time someone calls you an “Uncle Tom” I simply won’t cringe. I might even nod. I might even say “hell yeah.”

On, and by the way, remember that campaign promise of Obama’s, that he would close Gitmo upon taking office?

I am aghast at the the Supreme Court decision and furious at Obama’s DOJ. I completely agree with you when you say that when it comes to torture issues, Obama is worse than Bush – I think he is actually WORSE than Bush because at least under Bush, it was OK for the left to condemn the policies and at least Bush’s policies were publicized on most left-leaning sites. Now, under Obama, these same policies are going unnoticed.

But I disagree with your bringing race into your diary. Your diary made me uncomfortable, to say the least, and at first I thought it was the use of race that made me uncomfortable. But it is actually the content of the news in it that made me uncomfortable, and rightly so. This diary SHOULD make me uncomfortable, but should not provide me an excuse of “racist language and images” to ignore it.

The question remains: how much power do these bozos have, and how much power do other interests have: the CIA for instance never changes it’s policy at all–who controls them ? You can be damn sure someone does. Honduras, for instance–sure looks like CIA to me.

As much as I know about what this government is doing and has done throughout history when torture and indefinite detention became normalized all hopes of returning to a Republic based on a Constitution seems lost. I am cynical, I’ve been around a while, I am not shocked very often but this stuff sticks with me and takes the wind out of me.

Torture is the worst thing human beings can do. I can understand killing but I can’t understand torture as ever being necessary. When faced with the fact of torture I see the image of the painting “The Scream” staring me right in the face.

When they declare people non-persons that means that they are, for all intents and purposes, already dead. The fact that this agenda for torturing is based on no serious threat is even more horrifying. The GWOT is an Orwellian lie that isn’t even close to being true. This brings me to the sad realization that they are doing it for fun.

is one I want to represent the country I live in and the continent I hail from.

I had lesser expectations of Obama than many here which might explain why I am not as freaked out by how things have unfolded. With the exceptions of a few random blips in history modern America has always been pretty right wing. Americans have been groomed to be reactionary. Not that the place I come from (Canada) is the liberal utopia many people assume it to be.

FDR the big liberal everybody keeps getting all misty eyed about was perfectly alright with rounding up Japanese Americans taking their shit and putting them in cages.

I am not going to waste my breath defending Obama but I don’t like the imagery you have associated with him Inky. I am not saying that you are racist for the simple reason I think all of us (including me) are.

What bothers me is my perception that in your anger you are resorting to using the sort of imagery I think the right wing likes to employ to reveal deep white anxiety. Nor am I saying you are like a right wing pundit because I know you are not. But is is not a little odd that we would automatically “expect more” from Obama because he is a man of color? He is a man who ran for and became President and the President in this county is always going to be a man or woman who owes other big favors for giving him the prize.

Until we have publically funded elections we won’t ever have a truly populist President. Mind you that could also mean we end up with a populist from the right.

You know I think your essays are thought provoking not that my one opinion really counts but I like the way you use to anger to be articulate instead of the opposite. Anger renders me all muffled and I can’t gather myself.

Obama is just the symbol. He in’t evil nor our saviour. In many ways Inky he is less powerful than you. Think about it.

Although I`m very aware of calls of racism, I usually don`t see it as that important.

What I never see is racism in truth.

There may be truth in racism, but there should not be racism in the truth.

The facts put forth in the diary, I see as truths.

If there is any argument, it should be in disputing your facts & not under cover of racism.

In the last two images, both disgust me, although I find the last one more so.

My reason is that knowing of the horrors of slavery, we should have evolved a little more, to not be doing it again.

With this little known signing, (I believe by design) the status quo of 3/5ths holds firm for years to come.

I had high hopes with Obama, not because he was black, nor do I base my extreme disappointment in this signing because of it either, but you`d think belonging to a race that were considered chattel (see Latin origin, cattle), he`d be much more aware of the tangled web woven under his patronage.

As a supposed constitutional expert, he seems to be the definition of hypocrite.

As an aside, I tend to view “racism” more as, bigotry, possibly because of where I was raised. Having been spit on & beat down as a kid, for speaking English, the first black person I ever met was loved all over town when he came to play baseball for the town team.

I really first saw black/white racism when I came to the US, & had a hard time comprehending it.

of armaments world wide, the perpetuation of war and its endless strategizing, and our need for fuel to keep those machines rolling. The constitution has become irrelevant. We created a monster that is now consuming all of us. It’s as if torture is the byproduct of an uncontrollable machine in which people are excused from reponsibility.

Our so called freedoms and way of life is our justification i.e. our superiority. Sound familiar?

I guess we’re supposed to be patted on the back for at least openly discussing the issue. But notice how it’s in the context of the inevitable price that must be paid to

Read primary sources. Because when you take a blogger’s three-times-removed-from-the-source account of an issue, you’re having it filtered through so many middlemen that you’re taking a huge risk in taking their words at face value. Responsible blogging means researching those primary sources even when you want to bring another blogger’s work to our attention.

Neither the court case nor the arguments the DoJ made in this case have anything to do with antiwar.com’s allegations or Chris Floyd’s secondhand account of their secondhand account. Read the original documents for yourself, and when a blogger doesn’t actually cite those documents, you have cause to be suspicious. The circuit case made two decisions:

1. That Rumsfeld et. al. can be granted a special immunity to prosecution on constitutional issues that weren’t decided until long after the alleged behavior took place, and

2. That the specific line of legislation that the Rasul et. al. hinges on what the court considers a badly-written line of legislation, and all evidence of its inception and application show that it was never intended to apply universally. This was their decision in one sentence:

There is no doubt that RLUIPA’s [Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act] drafters, in changing the definition of “exercise of religion,” wanted to broaden the scope of the kinds of practices protected by RFRA, not to increase the universe of individuals protected by RFRA.

That’s what they’re saying: not that Rasul isn’t a “person” – did you know that most of the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to non-citizens, even when it refers to “people”? – and the decision is very clear on the scope of its applicability. Even the Rumsfeld decision is specific to this case and creates no precedent for future immunity. The Supreme Court agreed with these findings.

You don’t have to agree – and an intelligent analysis of where this decision will bring us will be most welcome – but this fantasy that the government has labeled the former detainees non-persons, or decided that torture was an acceptable government policy, etc. is just that: fantasy. All it takes is reading the actual texts of the decisions.

Read more. Read critically. Don’t swallow what other people tell you just because it fits your narrative well. And drop the racist bullshit.